February 24, 2015

Lincoln Michel is on the right track in using literary categories to differentiate between Boyhood and Birdman. He argues the latter belongs to the magical category, while the former is realist.

The "magician" school changes in part because that school’s credo is "make it new"; the aim is to push boundaries and flex one’s artistic muscles with ambitious conceits and ferocious style. For the realist school, the ethos is staying "true to life," and the goal is to move the reader with honesty and truth. Flashy voice, style, or structure merely "gets in the way" of the "simple, honest story."

The analogy between the literary and filmic categories isn't precise because of the different histories of each medium. Iñárritu’s long takes have long been associated with cinematic realism, while Linklater's seamless edits between periods of time violates classical Hollywood style by not situating us in time and place.

On the surface, Birdman seems to be the more stylistically daring film. Iñárritu’s techniques are wider-ranging than Linklater's. However, I think Boyhood is actually more of a stylistic outlier in the context of contemporary American filmmaking if only because of Linklater's stubborn adherence to cinematic realism. The only filmmakers working right now who use realist techniques with the same daring are the Dardenne brothers and Cristian Mungiu.

December 19, 2014

This isn’t a best of list so much as a list of texts and experiences that are still with me at the end of the year. I've linked to the entries if I've discussed the text in this space; if not, I've provided the easiest way to get to it.

A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James. This novel could also be called A Field Guide to Jamaican Cursing. Pretty much everyone in James’ long and uneven novel wants to kill somebody. The characters voice their threats and gripes in dense Jamaican dialect. I usually find dialect narratives to be tedious to read, but once you figure out the speech patterns and decode the colorful curse words (I liked “fuckery” in particular), the action really comes alive. James is as good as anyone writing now in creating distinct characters through voice. The first two-thirds of the novel, which relates the events surrounding the assassination attempt on Bob Marley in 1976, is better than the last third, when a new set of somewhat lackluster characters is introduced and the novel loses its focus and energy. James’ novel is the most original I’ve read from a major publisher in a long time.

My Struggle: Book 1, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Opinion about Knausgaard’s six-volume project is divided, to say the least. His story is a lot of the same thing, yet the novel works. Knausgaard is a sort of miserablist Proust. He remembers every beer he’s consumed since the age of twelve. There’s a theory--initiated by Sartre, I think--that says art advances by incorporating new kinds of experiences into itself. Knausgaard has us watch his hero wash dishes, walk to the drug store, and prepare instant coffee. It’s all weirdly fascinating, like watching a bedraggled Scandinavian family living in an Ikea store display. Knausgaard is overconfident about his skills as a writer, yet that’s precisely what makes the novel work. He believes in his material so deeply he's willing to stumble over his own awkward sentences to push it forward. My first thought after completing book one was, that was amazing. My second thought: Oh no, there are five more books of this stuff.

Redeployment, Phil Klay. It’ll be interesting to see what Klay does next. Will he move on to other subjects and settings? His mastery over his small but highly fraught world of US Marines in Iraq is so complete it’s hard to imagine him working with any other material.

Boyhood, Richard Linklater. Linklater’s big gamble is paying off in end of the year awards, which it richly deserves even if the attention is spoiling the film’s outsider vibe. I haven’t been astonished by a film to this degree since I was a graduate student in film studies, plowing through the backlog of great world cinema.

Ida, Pawel Pawlikowski. This film sprang out of nowhere during a Netflix session one Saturday night last month. Pawlikowski shoots it in an austere, precisely framed style, like Ingmar Bergman without the melodrama simmering beneath the surface. Agata Trzebuchowska plays the title character in a beatific deadpan. Agata Kulesza plays the aunt determined to disrupt Ida’s peace of mind. They trundle around Communist-era Poland in an incredibly flimsy car digging up secrets from the past. It’s hard to describe the film without making it seem slow and depressing—what could be drearier than the Holocaust and the Iron Curtain together in the same film? Actually, it’s very much the opposite of that.

Middlemarch, George Eliot. I’ll dispense with the excuses about my I’m only now getting around to reading it all the way through. Suffice it to say I was too young to read it before. Virginia Woolf once said Middlemarch was the only novel ever written for adults, and she’s right. Eliot begins where ordinary novels of the period would end: with a betrothal. Dorothea Brooke is young and smart, but this is England in 1832, so her prospects for happiness are narrow. To make matters worse, she seems to court misery by marrying Edward Casaubon, the most tedious man in England. (The marriage was supposedly based on a couple Eliot knew.) The novel follows Dorothea and her fellow villagers as they try to extricate themselves from their own bad choices. It’s a great novel, maybe the greatest English novel of the century. The distance between our time and 1869, when Eliot started composing the novel, can be measured in her starchy tone and occasionally lugubrious sentence structure. She's not humorless, though, and the novel gains power as you get caught up in the power of Eliot’s depiction of sensitive, intelligent people trying to right their lives.

Luftwerk show at Marina City. This was a slow year for architecture in Chicago. Plans for new projects have been announced—some interesting, others worrisome—but I didn't see any built projects worth mentioning. However, one pleasant night in August Iker Gil and MAS Context hosted a show staged by Luftwerk on the roof deck of Marina City. It was a great example of how architecture can frame an experience and change how you see the familiar. Speaking of MAS Context, check out the latest issue, ORDINARY. The highlights are an essay by Deborah Fausch, a project by Michael Hirschbichler, and a look at the Dingbats of Los Angeles by Joshua G. Stein. And Ordinary Architecture, a partnership of Elly Ward and Charles Holland, taught me “shonky,” an actual word.

Derrida: A Biography, Benoit Peeters. Does anyone still read Jacques Derrida? Probably not. Nevertheless, his central idea has become a verb in common parlance. Derrida would be horrified to hear people use the term “deconstruct” to apply to everything from a skyscraper to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He was famous (or notorious) for resisting all summaries and simplifications of his work. Reading his biography I could better understand why. Derrida was an extremely hard worker. His dense, difficult prose was the product of intense and nuanced intellectual labor. When he left his desk Derrida was a generous and, occasionally, insufferable man. By his own admission he was a poor father. He was a serial adulterer. He picked more fights with colleagues than he needed to. Like a lot of philosophers, he didn’t live the most eventful life. If you read Peeters’ biography, be prepared for a lot of conferences. Whatever your opinion of Derrida’s philosophy, he must be recognized as one of the keenest minds of the twentieth century.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson. The best film Anderson has made so far, it’s replete with off-the-wall period details like the coat check chit handed to a passenger after his cat was flung from the train. (Such Old World manners!) The plot isn’t worth summarizing; it’s really a vehicle for Anderson to link actions in amusing ways. Anderson keeps his customary whimsy at bay under the sobering influences of Stefan Zweig and Ernst Lubitsch. Ralph Fiennes is uncharacteristically sprightly as the busybody concierge, M. Gustave. The lobby boy Zero is exactly the kind of small canvas character Anderson excels in creating. With the exception of Bottle Rocket, the worlds of Anderson’s films are generally sealed off places where everyone speaks in the same punchy ironies. In this film you get the sense that just beyond the hills in Anderson’s imaginary Republic of Zubrowka some really awful things are happening.

David Bowie Is, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Chicago. The last days of this remarkable exhibition are at hand, so go revisit a time when it seemed like rock and roll really would never die.

December 16, 2014

Richard Brody provides an excellent introduction to Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady, a 1944 film noir. The film is urban expressionism, complete with a sweaty Lacanian plot of a missing point de capiton or quilting point. The wife of a man wrongly accused of murder seeks witnesses who can clear his name. The action takes place in a hot, dark New York in which everyone is struggling for survival--really, Berlin after World War I. (Siodmak was German.) The film's tension peaks in the "rape by jazz" scene, which Brody briefly analyzes.

Phantom Lady plays tonight at the Film Forum in New York. If you can't make it, the film isn't easy to find, but worth seeking out. Other Siodmak films to see are The Suspect (1944) and The Spiral Staircase (1945).

December 10, 2014

--Alexandre Gady, president of the Société pour la Protection des Paysages et de l’Esthétique de la France. Quoted in Adam Gopnik's excellent report on why Paris can't get rid of the ridiculous "love locks" on the Pont des Arts. By "finished" Gady means central Paris no longer needs, or wants, further development. Ever.

"Escape is not an option."

--Jason Mark on the film Interstellar, which depicts humans escaping from an ecological disaster on earth.

Kate Clark’s Little Girl, which Claudia Rankine used in her book Citizen: An American Lyric, to illustrate the conflict between an African-American woman and her psychiatrist. Read Ratik Asokan's interview with Rankine.

Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner says, “Something happened that nobody can make a movie between $500,000 and $80 million. That can’t be possible.” The mid-budget American film is disappearing, he and others claim. This is not a new trend for certain. It's not clear, though, if the extinction of the mid-budget film is hastening or if this is a continuation of a state of affairs in Hollywood that has existed since the 1970s. There are a number of consequences of the disappearance of the mid-budget film, if that's what's actually happening. Jason Bailey calls attention to the directors who can't get their projects funded. Spike Lee famously has to resort to Kickstarter to finance his latest film. David Lynch hasn't made a film in over a decade. Still, there are directors who regularly make mid-budget films. David Fincher's Gone Girl was made for a comparatively modest (by contemporary Hollywood standards) $61 million.

“Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it.”

—A nervy twelve-year-old girl writing in 1846. Joan Didion cited it as an example of self-respect, which leads one to put fears aside and do what needs to be done. Writing in 1961, Didion observed, "people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues."

“Our Secret Life in the Movies” has an extraordinary structure: Co-authors Michael McGriff and J.M. Tyree have assembled a list of 39 obscure art-house films as the starting point for a collection of brief, jagged improvisations on their respective youths. The result is a double-barreled bildungsroman of gothic, middle-American squalor and ruin.

October 27, 2014

David Castillo and William Egginton argue that the vampire is no longer a fully apt symbol for globalized capitalism. Since Karl Marx the vampire has been the symbol of capitalist exploitation, with the capitalist sucking the blood from the body of the worker. The allegory endures in part because the vampire’s deathless beauty corresponds to the preening attractiveness of the economic elites.

The figure of the vampire is a product of the Gothic imagination and its fascination with the cycles of sin and punishment. A Gothic world view, however, still presumes some underlying and meaningful order to human affairs. The vampire eventually dies. What happens when the only imaginable end is apocalypse? What happens to those people who vampires can’t be bother with?

All over the world there are great masses of people who aspire to be the living bodies to be exploited. Millions are born who will never contribute anything to the global economy. As German philosopher Niklas Luhmann puts it, "there is nothing to exploit in the favelas."

Castillo and Egginton don’t suggest the unexploited masses are zombies. Rather, the unexploited masses are indicative of a deeper purposelessness to the globalized economy. The real zombies are us.

Zombies are both newer and older than vampires. Zombies didn’t enter American popular culture until George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), but the idea that death comes in two parts—bodily and spiritual—pre-dates the Christian era. Sophocles’ Antigone is condemned to death, but her righteousness radiates long after her physical death. In her beauty and purposefulness, however, Antigone is the anti-zombie. The modern zombie endures physical death, but the law requires a state of being the body can’t satisfy. The result, according to Castillo and Egginton, is a "monstrous excrescences driven on by a fundamental imbalance in the world of men.”

We exist between two deaths--Lacan called it entre deux morts--stumbling along, mindlessly consuming just so the whole global engine can keep producing wealth, leaving the masses outside the system to pick over the waste products. There’s no alternative to global capitalism, so the obligation to consume will never cease until the world itself comes to an end.

September 19, 2014

Hilary Mantel wanted to kill Margaret Thatcher one day in 1983: “Immediately your eye measures the distance," she told the Guardian, her finger and thumb forming a gun. "I thought, if I wasn't me, if I was someone else, she'd be dead."

The spectral building—massively there, yet otherworldly: Proposed Nordstrom Tower, New York City. Height: one foot shorter than One World Trade Center.

As a friend put it to me: A tattoo isn’t the Word made flesh, but the flesh made word. It may strike old-fashioned types as pedestrian narcissism and adolescent conformity, and sometimes it surely is. But in a deeper and more troubling way, it is canny and subversive artifice, spiced with a moralistic claim to personal liberation. A tattoo is a personal statement but also an anthropological position that accords with the prevailing transvaluations of our time.

Tattoos are advertisements for a mind, written on a body that doesn’t always conform to a mental image.

September 08, 2014

I saw Richard Linklater’s Boyhood over the weekend. It’s the best film I’ve seen in a long time. I won’t fill you in on the film’s remarkable backstory. I’ll just try to convince you to see it while it’s still in the theaters.

With a 2:45 running time, you would expect Boyhood to drag on, but it glides by with sly elisions. When the film opens Mason (Ellar Coltrane) is cherubic and watchful. Then you notice his haircut has changed since the last scene; a year has passed. In the early scene Mason’s older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) gives voice to youthful discontent. Then Mason appears with his bangs out of control and you know we’re in middle school and Mason is not happy. Then, rather abruptly in his freshman year in high school, Mason starts speaking. Coltrane delivers his lines in two modes: a cool murmur and an adolescent rant. Neither mode addresses his immediate circumstances very directly. He struggles with issues of control and freedom, like any sensitive and aware kid his age. His paranoiad rants, though, sound downloaded from the Internet, which he claims to hate so much.

Coltrane’s most engaging scene in his early boyhood is his glowing expression as Mason lines up to buy the next installment of the Harry Potter saga. He’s dressed as Harry and his best friend is a dead ringer for Ron, which makes me wonder if Linklater hand’t been toying at one point at drawing a parallel between his project and the Harry Potter books. Mason’s is a bit of a wizard himself, the solitary product of two non-conformist parents with unresolved relationships with their own childhoods.

There are a lot of points at which Mason could have gone wrong. For example, there’s a scene involving underaged drinking and circular saw blades that looks like trouble from the opening frame. The bullying older boys have already settled uneasily into familiar patterns of male behavior reluctant. They’re not bad kids. They’re just timid and unimaginative. This scene is a model of what would happen if Mason gave up rather than went down the wrong path. His father is the wrong path, as Dad (Ethan Hawke) is at pains to remind him. In fact, there’s no real major personal crisis for Mason other than the breakup with his first girlfriend. She’s so pretty you know she’s going to break his heart.

Mason’s father consoles him with advice that is both sound (“These high school romances never work out”) and dubious (“Women are always trying to trade up”). Ethan Hawke brings his loquacious energy of Before Sunrise films to this one. His character has a lot to explain, especially when Samantha is in middle school. In the middle of an Astros game, when he’s thoroughly enjoying himself, she bluntly asks him, “Do you have a job?” He pauses for three or four seconds, a long time for a Hawke character, and provides an answer near enough to the truth to make us still like him.

Patricia Arquette, on the other hand, impresses without acting particularly well. She plays a single mom with poor taste in men, still falling for guys she meets in school. Anger is her character’s dominant emotion—and one that wouldn’t tax many actors. When Hawke’s character congratulates her on how well she’s raised her kids, Linklater cuts in for an extreme closeup to capture Arquette’s reaction and she doesn’t deliver. You can see her character has put herself back together, but you would expect to see more than one emotion register in her face. Arquette might be the film’s best chance for an Oscar nomination, but the part is bigger than she is. She doesn’t work her way fully into the role. Then again, Coltrane isn’t a charismatic actor. He’s like a chess piece placed strategically in the whirling scenes around him. You don’t want a Meryl Streep chewing up every scene. Linklater is playing a high-risk game here: he doesn’t know how the characters will be played with each passing year, so emphasis is tricky.

Without giving too much away, the ending of Boyhood is gratifying. Not only has Mason turned out well, so has Coltrane. He deserves all the praise that’s come his way. I wonder, though, how much he’s been shaped by working with Linklater all these years. Coltrane is a taciturn version of Ethan Hawke: self conscious about his own coolness, but kind of a one-note actor. Linklater likes to deploy Hawke in quiet places so we can hear everything his character has to say. Linklater inverts this strategy with Coltrane, embedding him with a lot of loud adults so that we have to listen very carefully to hear the quiet rustlings inside.

February 28, 2014

Although American Hustle seems unlikely to win a best picture Oscar this weekend, I will be rooting for it. As a period piece, it's less noble than 12 Years a Slave, but it has a better script and is a lot more fun to watch. The film captures not only the strangeness of the late 1970s, but also the pervasive desperation of the time. I was in high school at that time, and while I barely paid attention to Abscam--it seemed like a tawdry reprise of Watergate--I recall the sense of gloom my parents expressed at Paul Volker's crushing interest rates of 18% and more. In the depressing economic conditions of the time, hustling was as much of a coping strategy as it was a means to jimmy the system in one's favor. The New Deal was effectively dead, and with it died any chance that populist politics could affect capitalism for the common good.

Carmine Polito, played by Jeremy Renner, is based on Angelo Errichetti, the mayor of Camden in the unlucky days after RCA and Campbell's Soup abandoned the city. Polito wants to open a casino in Atlantic City, just as Errichetti did, but there is no money to be found. “The goddamn bankers," Polito complains. "Keeping their money on the sidelines. How we supposed to get anything done?” Polito manages to raise the money by illicit means, and for a moment, everything comes together in one great carnival of fraudulence as con artists, Federal agents, politicians and mobsters gather in an Atlantic City casino as the Bee Gees play "How Do You Mend a Broken Heart?"

American Hustle is all raucous surfaces, depicting a moment of pure artifice that will shatter once the new Darwinist economy is fully revealed by Ronald Reagan. Russell's characters bristle with desires, but their objects of desire are taking increasingly unrecognizable forms. Polito may be a canny big city mayor, but he's baffled by the first rich Arab he meets (actually a Mexican-American Federal agent disguised as a sheik). Rosalyn Rosenfield calls her new microwave "the space oven," as if she expects an alien to appear in her kitchen munching on microwave popcorn. No less of an oddity is the Atlantic City casino itself, a Las Vegas-style structure marooned in the land of machine politics and organized labor. These things appear strange only against the backdrop of laissez-faire capitalism, the new nature that is about to take over the world of the American middle-class.

October 02, 2013

In Rain, you are invisible. The only time you can see your character — a small boy wandering a dark city — is when you venture out into the seemingly never-ending downpour. With a lead character who is not only invisible, but also mute, Rain's main appeal lies in its presentation: a haunting soundtrack coupled with dark and moody visuals make this an experience that feels more like a French film than a traditional video game. The adventure has you following the trail of a young, equally invisible girl, and attempting to unravel the mysteries of the monster-filled, people-free world. The end result is one of the most unique and beautiful experiences on the PlayStation 3.

Andrew Webster goes on to specify this PS3 game is like a silent French film, which, in itself, is reason to buy the game. He doesn't venture any titles, but Louis Feuillade's great serial Fantômas (1915-1916) immediately comes to mind. So does Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures (1926).

What Is One-Way Street?

One-Way Street [Einbahnstrasse, 1928] was Walter Benjamin's first effort to break out of the narrow confines of the academy and apply the techniques of literary studies to life as it is currently lived. For Benjamin criticism encompasses the ordinary objects of life, the literary texts of the time, films in current release, and the fleeting concerns of the public sphere. Following Benjamin's lead, this blog is concerned with the political content of the aesthetic and representations of the political in the media. As Benjamin writes in One-Way Street, "He who cannot take sides should keep silent."